Insecure people are less likely to use local accents for fear of not fitting
in to wider society, an academic has said.

Clive Upton, Professor of Modern English Language at Leeds University, said that people who are “comfortable in their skin” are far more likely to use local forms of speech than people who are unsure of themselves.

Prof Upton told the BBC: “If someone is reasonably comfortable in their skin they will be very natural in the way they speak and will deploy local forms [of speech]. If they are a bit twitchy about how they fit into the scheme of things they are likely to veer towards the standard dialect.”

He said that people who are sure of themselves “can slide between the standard and the non-standard and fit in very easily”.

The academic also said that people are generally keener than they were in the past to sound different from other people.

“People now are pretty well freed up to use their local speech in the right situations. People are cute enough generally to know when they need to deploy the standard dialect and when they need to deploy for useful purposes their non-standard dialect,” he said.